Swanage Station — Swanage Railway

Swanage is the coastal terminus of the ten-mile Purbeck branch, and the camera looks straight down the platform and tracks where the railway's resident locomotives sit between turns. Swanage Railway publishes three webcams in total — "SWANAGE STATION WEBCAM", "CORFE CASTLE STATION WEBCAM" and "CORFE CASTLE STATION WEBCAM 2" — and describes them as "a bird's eye view of our railway from two station webcams at Swanage and Corfe Castle stations". There is no camera at Herston, Harman's Cross or Norden.

The hardware is not the railway's. Railcam UK, which states plainly that it "is a website, based in the UK, which installs and operates railway-related webcams" and has been "Bringing The Lineside To Your Armchair - Since 2009", funds and maintains the installation; the railway is the host. Swanage Railway's own announcement of the first Corfe Castle camera, dated 23 October 2014, credits RailCam.org.uk as "a not for profit group relying on public donations to set up and maintain webcams on railways around the country", covering "the cost of obtaining, setting up and maintaining" it after volunteer porter John Hallett suggested the idea.

The line's own history is short and violent. "The ten-mile branch line from Wareham to Corfe Castle and Swanage was opened in May, 1885" — the railway's 140th-anniversary release dates the first public passenger train precisely to Wednesday, 20 May 1885, and the brass horn sounded that day is described as a "London and South Western Railway brass horn". "The last train ran from Swanage to Corfe Castle and Wareham on the evening of Saturday, 1 January, 1972", and "The summer of 1972 saw almost seven miles of track… lifted". Volunteers moved in on the station buildings in February 1976; passenger trains returned to Swanage in 1979, reached Herston in 1984, Harman's Cross in 1989, and "Train services were extended to Corfe Castle and Norden during the summer of 1995". In 2017 the railway ran a 60-day trial diesel service through to the main line at Wareham.